2019 Bugatti Chiron Sport '110 Ans Bugatti'

When Bugatti reached back into its own mythology to name a car after a dead man’s birthday, the gesture felt almost too on-brand. The EB 110 supercar of the 1990s existed as a monument to Ettore Bugatti’s centenary - the kind of thing only a marque with genuine history, or one desperate to invent it, would do. So when the Molsheim atelier announced a second round of anniversary theatre in February 2019, naming a special edition of the Chiron Sport in honour of the company’s own 110th founding year, the question was whether this would be marketing dressed as heritage, or something genuinely worth the embroidery.

The answer is more complicated than either the sceptics or the devotees would admit, and it starts with understanding exactly what the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ is. It is not a new car, nor even a substantially re-engineered one. It is a Chiron Sport - itself a focused, lighter, more dynamically biased evolution of the standard Chiron - wearing a precisely considered suit of national colours and carrying the weight of 110 years of French automotive identity on its active rear wing. Twenty were made. The number is deliberate, the symbolism almost oppressively layered, and the result is one of the most visually and emotionally coherent special editions Bugatti has ever produced.

2019 Bugatti Chiron Sport '110 Ans Bugatti'

The Chiron Sport, upon which the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ is based, represents a meaningful departure from the standard Chiron rather than a cosmetic trim level. Engineers shaved roughly 18 kg from the kerb weight through the use of windscreen wipers made from carbon fibre - absurd in the best possible way - along with optimised aerodynamics and revised suspension tuning that made the car feel genuinely more alert. The torque-vectoring differential on the rear axle, absent from the standard Chiron, fundamentally changes the relationship between driver intent and car response. It is the difference between a car that accommodates your inputs and one that magnifies them. The ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ inherits all of this without dilution, positioned not as the most extreme Chiron variant but as the most emotionally expressive - which is saying something in a range that eventually spawned the Pur Sport and the Super Sport 300+.

Mechanically, the core of the car is the 8.0-litre, quad-turbocharged W16 - a configuration so baroque in concept that it sounds like it was designed by committee in the grip of a collective fever dream, yet executed with a precision that borders on the religious. Sixteen cylinders arranged in four banks of four, two cylinder banks per crankshaft journal, two crankshafts coupled together - it is an engine that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and it produces 1,479 bhp at 6,700 rpm and 1,180 lb-ft of torque from as low as 2,000 rpm. That torque plateau - enormous and essentially flat across the rev range - is why the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ reaches 62 mph in under 2.4 seconds and continues onwards towards a 261 mph top speed with an almost supernatural lack of drama. The seven-speed dual-clutch transmission, dealing with more torque than any other gearbox on the planet in a production car, swaps ratios with a composure that feels almost insulting to the violence happening beneath the bodywork.

The design language of the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ is where Bugatti’s creative team showed genuine restraint, which is, in itself, a creative decision. The exterior is finished in matte Steel Blue - a colour that suggests industrial seriousness rather than showmanship - with the front end panels rendered in exposed Steel Blue Carbon. This two-tone division of the monocoque, where body-coloured panels meet carbon fibre at a deliberate seam, is a motif that traces back to the Veyron 16.4 of 2005 and, before that, to Bugatti road cars of the 1920s. It is continuity made visible, which is what the best automotive design does. The signature C-shaped line that frames the cabin - one of the Chiron’s most recognisable design elements - was finished in the same matte Steel Blue, tying the car’s profile together without competing for attention. The horseshoe radiator surround, an institution since Ettore’s day, remains in aluminium, handmade. Some things do not need improving.

The Tricolore details, meanwhile, are deployed with a precision that rewards close inspection rather than demanding it. Mirror caps wear “Le Bleu-Blanc-Rouge” - and in a detail that most people will miss entirely - the orientation is mirrored on the passenger side, following the protocol for official French state vehicles, so the blue of the flag always faces forward. Beneath the active rear wing, the full French flag is rendered in paint. The ceramic brake callipers are finished in French Racing Blue, nestled behind “Nocturne” matte black alloy wheels that keep the overall palette from tipping into excess. A sandblasted, hand-polished filler cap and a matte black EB logo on the sports exhaust system show the same discipline: every element has thought behind it, and the sum of those elements is a car that manages to celebrate France without looking like a football shirt.

Inside, the hand-crafted Deep Blue leather interior continues the conversation. The sports seats carry Tricolore embroidery on their backs and headrests - a vertical flag, correctly oriented - and the 12 o’clock marker on the carbon fibre and blue leather steering wheel is similarly adorned. French Racing Blue appears on the contours of the seats, in the stowage compartments, on the belt trims, and across the leather of the window switches. The “Sky View” roof, a pair of laminated glass fixed panels that Bugatti normally charges a significant premium for on standard Chiron models, is fitted here as standard, flooding the cabin with light and making the deeply dark interior feel less like a cockpit and more like a room. It is one of the genuinely distinctive features of the edition, and one that owners in warmer climates particularly appreciate, even if purists might argue the additional glass works against the Sport variant’s weight-reduction philosophy.

And that is, honestly, the most substantive criticism of the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’. It is a special edition defined by addition - more emblems, more embroidery, more meaning - rather than by the kind of mechanical differentiation that characterised the Pur Sport’s 65% stiffer front springs, shortened gear ratios, and magnesium wheels. The Sky View roof, a fixed glass panel over an already heavy car, nudges the kerb weight toward 1,977 kg - a figure that makes the “Sport” designation feel somewhat aspirational. At its limit, the Chiron Sport is not a nimble car; it is an extraordinarily capable one, which is different. The torque-vectoring rear differential helps, but it cannot entirely overcome the laws of physics governing 1,977 kg of carbon fibre, aluminium, and W16 engine when asked to change direction quickly. The Pur Sport is the car that actually addresses this - shorter gears, firmer suspension, more committed in every mechanical sense. The ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ remains a grand tourer at heart, one that happens to be wearing a racing number.

Driving one is therefore not primarily an experience of cornering precision or mechanical feedback in the conventional sports car sense. It is an experience of velocity delivered with incomprehensible smoothness. At low speeds, the car is tractable, the suspension absorbing urban realities without complaint, the interior quiet enough for conversation. At motorway speeds, the sense of reserve - the awareness that the car is operating at perhaps 15% of its capability - is genuinely unnerving. Then you accelerate properly, and the four turbochargers come fully into their work, and the 1,180 lb-ft torque plateau arrives all at once, and the world rearranges itself. It is not aggressive in the way a naturally aspirated racing engine is aggressive; it is more like a very fast lift: composed, relentless, and slightly indifferent to your emotional state.

Culturally, the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ sits at an interesting intersection. Released in 2019, it preceded Bugatti’s subsequent acquisition by Rimac by two years and represents the late flowering of the Volkswagen Group era at Molsheim - a period defined by almost unlimited engineering budgets, total commitment to the W16, and an approach to hypercar building that prioritised the demonstration of technical mastery over all other considerations. the standard Chiron itself had already secured this legacy, but the ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ edition gave collectors something to hold: a car that connected Ettore’s founding vision in 1909 to the pinnacle of what his company had become, wrapped in the specific blue, white, and red that makes Molsheim - technically in France, spiritually in both France and Germany - legible as a French institution.

The reception was straightforward: it sold out, presumably before the ink dried on the press release. Twenty cars at Bugatti’s pricing represent a combined figure that exceeds the GDP of a small municipality, and every one found a home. Critics noted, correctly, that the mechanical package under the special-edition clothing was not significantly evolved from the Chiron Sport, and that a buyer seeking the most engaging driving experience within the Chiron family would be better served by waiting for the Pur Sport. But that assessment misreads the brief. The ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ was never competing on lap times. It was competing on meaning - on the ability to distil 110 years of corporate identity, French national pride, and engineering hubris into a single object with a horseshoe radiator and a Tricolore under its wing.

With Bugatti now committed to a hybrid V16 architecture for its successor model, the W16 era is conclusively over, and the Chiron family - including this particular twenty-car coda - has passed from production reality into collector mythology. The ‘110 Ans Bugatti’ was never the fastest or the most dynamically pure variant in the Chiron lineup, and it was never trying to be. It was trying to be significant. On that measure, and perhaps only on that measure, it succeeded without qualification.